Up Front

By The Editors

Published: November 19, 2006

The many facets of Steven Heller are dizzying to contemplate. In addition to serving as the Book Review's longtime art director, from 1977 to just over a month ago (he is currently on sabbatical from the newspaper), he has been a vital presence in the New York art world. He founded the M.F.A. ''Designer as Author'' program at the School of Visual Arts, sits on the design and architecture acquisitions committee of the Museum of Modern Art and won the American Institute of Graphic Arts Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 1999. He has also written or edited more than 100 books and is now completing a new one on the graphic campaigns of the 20th century's dictatorships.

This week yet another side of Heller is on display in his review (on Page 18) of the new memoir by Al Goldstein, the flamboyant editor of Screw magazine who was a fixture on the Manhattan scene in the 1960s and beyond. Heller revisits those years with an insider's knowledge: he was Screw's first art director, at the ripe age of 17. It was a formative experience, he writes, not least because Goldstein gave him ''the freedom and encouragement'' to learn the craft he later honed at the Book Review. The Editors

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